One of the reasons I unexpectedly found myself in the journalism industry was the real possibility of speaking truth to power, presenting radically novel perspectives, and challenging institutional orthodoxy.
My first major forays into the industry were on topics such as how
my experiences with racism from childhood inform my view of race relations, how white guilt and identity politics
corrupts our discourse, and how 2020 Black Lives Matter
riots wreaked havoc in poor, minority communities.
Foreign Policy Magazine (top-left), Maclean's Magazine (top-right), The New York Post (bottom-left), The Globe and Mail (bottom-right)
Pieces that I’m perhaps most proud of are the explosion of
inner-city violence in Minneapolis in the aftermath of George Floyd and the new phenomenon of
Asian women out-earning white men in the U.S.
My heterodoxy and unwavering commitment to the truth — whether that made me look right-wing, left-wing, or just an artsy weirdo (at times) — didn’t land me a weekly
New York Times column, but it did grant me spots in a number of top liberal and conservative-leaning outlets, such as
The New York Post, The Globe and Mail, Foreign Policy Magazine, The Grammys (yes, the music awards — their online vertical)
, and others.
Until it didn’t.
Having taken the heretical line on race, gender, policing, I thought I was immunized from editorial censorship. But, as the pandemic became increasingly politicized through 2021 and 2022 with the roll-out of vaccines and public mandates, our society seemed to plunge into further
collective psychosis, as spiritual teacher
Eckhart Tolle has persipaciously observed.
For the first year-and-a-half of the pandemic, I didn’t take any public stance on what was a complex epidemiological issue requiring legitimate expertise to navigate. Besides, I was regularly writing about race, BLM, and policing in the summer of 2020. Then, in the summer of 2021 Justin Trudeau and provincial leaders announced vaccine mandates across the country. Suddenly, going to the gym, restaurants, and large gatherings was conditional on taking a novel mRNA vaccine for a virus that posed less than a
0.003% mortality risk for people my age.
I started to examine whether this was the right medical decision for my health. Upon close scrutiny of the best available data, I came away thinking it was not. I didn’t think the Covid vaccine would be an instant death sentence for me, but I didn’t see clear evidence of benefit for healthy people in their 20s. It also just happened to be the case that I fell in the very demographic that was most at-risk of developing a serious vaccine side effect — myocarditis or pericarditis (cardiac inflammation). Among the most rigorous, comprehensive data we have on vaccine myocarditis is from Dr. Katie Sharff who analyzed a database from
Kaiser Permanente. She found a 1/1,862 rate of myocarditis after the second dose in young men ages 18 - 24. For boys ages 12 - 17, the rate was 1/2,650. Active surveillance monitoring in
Hong Kong shows virtually identical figures.
Confused and looking for clarity, I reached out to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — who was among the most sensible public health policy advocates throughout the pandemic — and he validated my serious concerns of vaccine safety and draconian public health policy more broadly.
Frustrated by the government coercing me into taking a medical procedure that was not in my best interest, I resolved to write about this injustice in the several outlets who had previously published my work.
Right away, I faced tremendous resistance of the kind that I never expected. The rejection I experienced when pitching a wide variety of pieces on Covid mandates — reported, opinionated, based on the views of credentialed scientific experts etc — was unprecedented. Even editors who I deemed as allies — publishing polarizing pieces such as the
“fallacies of white privilege” or why Robin DiAngelo’s last popular racism guide-book promotes a
“dehumanizing form of condescension towards racial minorities” — were averse to my work questioning scientifically dubious vaccine mandate policies on the grounds of bodily autonomy and medical freedom.
